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TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

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Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#281

Post by WesleyJohnson »

ryandrake wrote: post #130
magic_hamster wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 50s are still a long way ahead of me and yet I didn't last 10 minutes on tiktok.

I check it out every few months or so when there's a new TikTok article on the front page of HN, and I can never understand it. All I see is 20-something nobodies dancing and making faces in front of a camera. I'm in my 40s and it's just not for me.

As another comment said, the more you use it the more it understand what you like and it gets better, and more addictive.

When I first started watching TikTok videos, I got the videos of 20-somethings dancing to the same song over and over and over. It was annoying. But now my "feed" is largely chefs making interesting dishes, like-minded people with opinions on politics (yes, I know echo chambers are dangerous), wood working, lawn care and pressure-washing videos for that dose of satisfaction, and then your random 10-second bytes of this generation's "America's Funniest Home Videos".

I don't watch every day, maybe a few days a week. But when I'm done watching, I'm usually grinning and feeling like it was time well spent, emotionally.

To each their own.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#282

Post by mrex »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #117
mrex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> why you AREN'T afraid of this? I think the trick is to understand it, and once you realize what your choices are, then it's an easy decision not dictated by fear. That is, you either work towards a future where choice remains, or you concede choice until you have none left.

Reality is made of results, not intentions, so ultimately it's those that we're accountable for. This is one of the most considerable challenges for a species with such creativity, emotional drive, and long vision.

I fear the results of a world where China's deliberate moves towards dominance are unopposed, or ineffectively opposed. Even if everyone has the right intentions as we face down that risk, it's the results that matter.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#283

Post by micromacrofoot »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #268
nemo44x wrote: post #257

Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture. No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.

which is why facebook was smart to buy instagram (checks notes) 10 years ago. Time for them to buy the next gen interface for socializing with friends for zoomers

People weren't happy with Instagram selling to Facebook, but the bigger problems and general drag of Facebook being Facebook didn't exist at the time. Now selling to Facebook is almost a surefire way to lose street cred. Snapchat famously said no to $3bn, and TikTok probably wouldn't consider it for any amount.

I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool. I think their window has closed, and as the parent comment says, Facebook can't do it anymore simply because they're Facebook.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#284

Post by Agamus »

concordDance wrote: post #240
mrtksn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour. Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are ph…

> It might seem like long time ago but American-made social media was riddled with conspiracy theorist and white supremacists I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online. I'd bet at least 40% of Americans have views that if stated online would get them a white supremacist label and I bet the figure for conspi…

> I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online.

My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.

New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#285

Post by chasd00 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #211
9dev wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think self-hosted will ever happen. Centralisation wins for consumer services. This has been proven even with the crypto shitshow, which revolves by and large around a few centralised platforms. On the other hand, are micro-blogs so different from TikTok stories, other than the format of the content (text vs. video)?

I don’t think self hosting can win either. As you’re saying. I do like the idea of everything like micro blogs not having to be on a central site. Though even that seems unlikely. It would be nice to have the format of blogs again where there’s different subdomains or domains and you can’t directly click thru to get to the rest of the “social media” bigger org. I sort of described substack here but a bit more persona…

is geocities.com available? i like being old enough to witness how back and forth the pendulum swings...

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#286

Post by smoldesu »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #283
calvinmorrison wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is why facebook was smart to buy instagram (checks notes) 10 years ago. Time for them to buy the next gen interface for socializing with friends for zoomers

People weren't happy with Instagram selling to Facebook, but the bigger problems and general drag of Facebook being Facebook didn't exist at the time. Now selling to Facebook is almost a surefire way to lose street cred. Snapchat famously said no to $3bn, and TikTok probably wouldn't consider it for any amount. I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool. I think t…

> I really can't imagine any situation where a younger gen z kid finds anything Facebook owns cool.

Really? Things must be different now, I remember Instagram being the most popular social media platform at my high school.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#287

Post by tzs »

askafriend wrote: post #36
timeimp wrote: post #19

I've heard (anecdotally) that the attention span of all the younger users has taken a dramatic shift south. Educators and employers are noticing they cannot keep students / new employees engaged. Makes me wonder what damage is happening, long-term, with all these short bursts of dopamine that TikTok gives it users.

Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers ar…

One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions.

When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#288

Post by moolcool »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #268
nemo44x wrote: post #257

Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture. No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.

which is why facebook was smart to buy instagram (checks notes) 10 years ago. Time for them to buy the next gen interface for socializing with friends for zoomers

I'd prefer that facebook just fade into obscurity, and also hopefully face some kind of consequence for the incalculable harm they caused the world along the way.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#289

Post by chasd00 »

linuxhansl wrote: post #187

I long stopped be a user of Facebook. In the beginning I liked the easy way it afforded me to keep in contact with friends and acquaintances. Then it included more and more "other" stuff, and I just lost interest in it. Shame really. In the beginning it was so useful and I honestly did not mind being shown some ads in exchange for that. But now my data would be used not only to selects ads but also the other content,…

i use facebook in a write-only mode. I just post pictures of various life events ( vacation, bdays, those kinds of things) for my family to see. I don't think i've ever gone to facebook to consume content.

edit: well, i do goto facebook marketplace when looking for things to buy like tools or computer parts.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#290

Post by djsweet »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #268
nemo44x wrote: post #257

Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture. No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.

which is why facebook was smart to buy instagram (checks notes) 10 years ago. Time for them to buy the next gen interface for socializing with friends for zoomers

Meta might not be legally able to buy “the next big thing” in international markets. Neither the EU nor the US are particularly “friendly” to them right now, and pretty much anything Meta does in the social media category is going to run up against anti-trust regulation.

Instagram was probably the last time Facebook could have gotten away with that sort of thing in the North American and European markets. I’m being cautious to only include those markets because I’m not familiar with the regulatory environment elsewhere.

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